Judge Jim Gray on Drug Legalization
One of the things that annoys me in our national discourse is the way those on the left refuse to recognize the inefficiencies of government on their favorite projects while those on the right do the same thing with theirs. The phrase “legitimate function of government” is a license to all sorts of evils, most importantly the idea that since government must operate courts and have police, military, and other security services, somehow these legitimate functions will tend to work well.
But the factors that make government work at less that the best efficiency in social welfare programs lead to inefficiency in these other roles as well. The problem is measuring success and then rewarding it or penalizing failure as appropriate. By their own standards government agencies do not fail and there is little in the universe that cannot be managed if you will give the right agency more money–in their own terms.
One great boondoggle in this country is the drug war. We’re losing it. We have been from the first. Now please don’t put me in the category of folks looking for a new high. I avoid even over-the-counter pain killers. I don’t use alcoholic beverages. I’d like to reduce drug use, but it doesn’t seem to me that we’re managing to do it. So consider me someone dragged toward this point of view against his own will.
OK, I’m not an expert. Watch this video. He does has some claim to being an expert. I dislike the section that looks like a slap at law enforcement (which he immediately denies, but still …). It’s not law enforcement’s fault if they enforce the law. That’s what we pay them for. I do agree that drugs provide an exceptional opportunity for corruption.
Give it some consideration.
(HT: Dispatches)
It’s been a while since I visited your blog. This post caught my eye. I agree that the drug war is having little effect on drug use, but I don’t advocate legalizing drugs. The points made by the judge in the video are the typical talking points that you hear from those who advocate legalization. But there are a lot of problems with the statements that leave me unconvinced. There continues to be an unwillingness by the pro legalization groups to address that fact that legal alcohol usage and legal tobacco usage still has a devastating impact on society. By all measures, cocaine, meth, heroin, and most likely marijuana are more powerful, more addictive (psychologically or physically), and will have as many or more consequences than their legal counterparts. Marijuana is beginning to follow a similar path to tobacco where it started to become fashionable, doctors endorse it’s usage and then we embark on several decades of usage with the corporatization of marijuana. Thirty years from now we’ll find out what the real effects of widespread legal marijuana usage is and we’ll be right back in the same spot we are now with tobacco. Also we apparently have a short memory about the horrors we suffered as a nation after the civil war when the addiction rate to morphine skyrocketed and left a generation of struggling addicts.
It’s telling that modern neuroscience is just beginning to unravel the mechanisms of addiction to these substances where they are showing substantial physical changes in the brains structure that are exacted by these drugs that induce the physical addictions that people can’t break. While hollywood romanticizes addiction as if it’s just a matter of will power, they forget the relapses and bury the stories that take the shine off the myths they build.
The war on drugs may certainly need to be changed, but it isn’t the war on drugs that keeps the addicts using. Recreational users aren’t the cash cows perpetuating the demand for drugs. The addicts who have been physically altered by these substances who must use day to day simply to exist are what keeps the cash flowing. I can’t see how a responsible government shouldn’t be allowed to regulate or eliminate something like that.
Thank you for a great post
It is so interesting to think of the concept of addiction or obsession. The connection between the body and soul. The conscious and the subsconscious. The body telling you to do something that is bad for you that you need it to live. People that have not experienced chemical addiction cannot understand.